My pre-law major encouraged spinning a good argument, backed by well researched facts. Delivering the message with persuasive language was all important. Had I studied law beyond sociology and political science, such tools would have served well. Instead, I chose to round out my education in the humanities and psychology, opening my senses to the motives that drive human beings—rather than their surface dialogue…
Approaching my senior year in earned credits, I volunteered for the University Year for Action program and found myself assigned to the Oregon State Employment Office at Springfield, dealing with youth employment issues. The head of the UYA program was Professor Runyan. Professor Runyan oversaw our job placements and headed weekly group and individual meetings to discuss students’ community assignments. Professor Runyan’s background was Psychology, which she ably applied to her tasks.
My bent being Sociology, I spent a good amount of time analyzing the processes of the Oregon State Employment Office, the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of service delivery plus the broader issues of unemployment concerns, job seeking and employer expectations. For the curriculum portion of the UYA program, I wrote detailed assessments and shared success numbers and statistics related to Lane County’s youth employment. My work included job and training placements, and the program had a fair amount of applicant successes in each area.
Over time, the bureaucratic shortcomings of the employment agency became obvious. Individual state departments of employment adhere to the oldest Federal mandates—and bureaucracy—the U.S. Department of Labor. Stacks of legalese-laden tomes lined the office shelves, a light year’s distance from the lines of unemployed, frustrated and fearful clients.
On one week’s debriefing, Professor Runyan asked in earnest about the problems and issues surrounding my assignment. My response was full of details, analytical pearls about the shortfalls of the process, a convincing description of how the office personnel categorized and systematically dealt with the unemployed clients as if they were numbers, the chilling distance between the hardships of unemployment and the clearly delineated—and markedly limited—services offered.
Professor Runyan listened patiently and supportively acknowledged my eloquent presentation. Apparently, I was on path to another “A” in my UYA course curriculum, an impressive block of 400-level Psychology credits!
Professor Runyan’s academic focus was Adlerian psychology, and she had only one remaining question. “So what are you going to do about that?” she queried.
Although the curriculum was Psychology, couched in Western cultural language and philosophy, the question struck like a Zen koan. I thought the debrief was about facts, viewpoints and an airing of issues. Though Professor Runyan had genuine interest in the services we rendered to the community, she also wanted to know each student’s personal relationship to the process. Where Sociology studies people within groups and cultures, Professor Runyan’s question came from a much deeper level, leaving me, well, tongue-tied. Was I tilting windmills and venting, or were there substantive things that could be accomplished in that placement?
In my life, epiphanies have come in bits and pieces. Few have rung my bell. That simple question, tangentially targeted to my gut instead of my head, illuminated the difference between Sociology and Psychology. In the last year of studies leading to my degree, UYA provided more than community service. We learned to identify human need at the visceral level.
I chose not to pursue law but, instead, writing. Though my goal was fiction, I found technical writing and publishing readily accessible, capitalizing on topics that related to my mechanical, pre-collegiate skills. From the early 1980s through the mid-‘90s, I found ready outlets for my journalism, non-fiction writing and photographic illustration work, all the while waiting for the “right time” to write my first novel.
For many of those years, like other writers, I found a host of reasons for postponing my original goal. Eventually, I discovered why. Had I written a “Vietnam novel” fresh out of college, I would have been academic in my approach. Interim years of marriage and parenting, striving for mobility and supporting the tax system were a useful reality check. Somewhere in that process, I studied Taoism, schools of Buddhism and Asian history…Only then did Indra’s Net emerge—and when it did, the draft and first edit pass of a 186,000-word novel took a mere seven months to complete. That interval included forty minutes of meditation practice each day…
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Indra’s Net
While Indra’s Net speaks to WWII and the Vietnam experience, it also speaks to the larger issue of war. War is once again the central theme of American foreign policy, and my blog welcomes earnest viewpoints and founded facts that illuminate the impact of contemporary wars and ways nations can ameliorate political and cultural differences—and defeat terrorism—short of wide-scale military conflict…Take in the novel. It’s up for discussion.—Moses Ludel
“…this ambitious novel spreads its net across the marches of history, reeling in gold nuggets of intriguing fictional action…One of the best things about this novel is the author’s firm grasp of history, especially as experienced from the viewpoint character Dinh…the comprehensive novel reads like a history book without the boring bits…An engaging, satisfying, and richly lengthy read.”—****Holly Chase Williams, ForeWord CLARION Reviews.
Featured at the New York and Los Angeles BookExpo, Beijing and Frankfurt Book Fairs…Available through all major book outlets and independent bookstores in soft cover edition and Amazon Kindle book.
